Death-Defying Facts
Paul Werner
Cover of Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yves-Alain Bois and Benjamin Buchloh?s Art Since 1900: Modernism. Antimodernism. Postmodernism. Thames and Hudson, 2004.
Late at night around the fire, academics speak in hushed tones of the Whifflebird, a mythical animal that chases itself in ever-narrowing circles until it flies up its own tail-end and disappears. At 754 pages and $85.00 US, this book isn’t likely to disappear, just implode.
Art Since 1900 spells out Required Textbook in a College Survey Course in big, bold letters, and it works hard for your student dollar: it’s got four Introductions, a guide on "How to Use this Book," a Preface, two "Roundtables," a Glossary, "Further Readings" a selection of "useful websites," recurring timelines, and more. And it’s got more facts than your old professor had tics.
Problem is, the facts are overwhelmingly fudged, or misleading, starting with the first seven words of the first full sentence in the book: "1900: Sigmund Freud publishes The Interpretation of Dreams." In fact the Interpretation of Dreams was published in 1899; it was given the false date of 1900 by Freud himself. Not important, you say? Well, important enough if you’re not to proceed from the platitude that Freud was a Victorian thinker whose contributions to modernism came in spite of himself. If you know your Freud and you’ve read about Freud you know this, and you know not to pass on platitudes as theory. But Art Since 1900 is full of these slips, these inaccuracies by the hundreds, these hints that the writers haven’t researched their topic but picked it up from secondary sources.
Ah, the postmodernist affirmation of the subjectivity of the authorial voice. Actually the four authors haven’t signed their separate contributions, but since the the three male contributors are in varying degrees ex-students, followers and intellectual clones of Rosalind Krauss one hears a single voice through the multitude of disconnected opinions: the Generic Krauss. Besides, a high number of passages are simply recycled from articles by Krauss. And though that single voice shifts abruptly from one section to another, passing from the slow-mo’ language usually reserved for bewildered freshmen (Hey, kids, can you say "Gesamtkunstwerk?") to the casual stringing of terminologies overheard every day among graduate students trying to impress one another, in the end it’s all the same, two sides of the same, well-worn coinage whose value is: talking down.
Mind you, I have no problem helping the slow learners–that’s my job. And I don’t have a problem with being a graduate student, having solved that problem a little while back through a simple expedient called a "degree." And I have no problem with facts being wrong; like a good little postmodernist I look at the way they connect. Problem is, in this book they don’t.
Here’s an example. One of the four Introductions (on "Formalism and Structuralism") is half taken up with a report about a seminar held by Roland Barthes at which, GK coily informs us, she was present. The conclusion: "[Bertolt] Brecht, in short, was a formalist." GK then rambles on to tell us her intellectual mentor, Clem Greenberg, was as much of a formalist as Brecht.
And what’s the connection? Between Barthes and Greenberg? Greenberg and Brecht? Or Greenberg’s theories and Barthes’ and Brecht’s? And if this discussion is about Formalism and Structuralism then why is a crucial discussion between Lévi-Strauss and Paul Ricoeur over this very issue left out? Or is this all about Greenberg and GK? And do we have, maybe, a problem with boundaries between Greenberg and GK, Barthes and GK, art critics and artists, or GKs one through four? There’s an implicit syllogistic thinking here that has no basis in fact, or in theory–just in gossip.
And how does GK connect the dots? In the first two paragraphs of this essay the names of Barthes, Saussure, Peirce, Lévi-Strauss, Foucault, Lacan, Jakobson and Derrida come up, yet when you turn to the bibliography at the end of this section you find all of five titles. Turn back to the main bibliography and you’re no better off–worse off, in fact, because the first bibliography contains three primary sources out of a total of five titles; In the main bibliography the proportion is about one out of five.The whole book is like that, coy allusions to the shadow of the reflection of a discussion that happened in another time, in a SoHo bar far, far away. Most of it is second-hand, all of it chatter. All arguments vanish up the peacock’s tail-feathers, as if the real point was not to work with students and readers but to preen in front of them: "you’re supposed to know this already."
Well, it’s theory you say, and you can’t get a theory wrong. You can’t say, for instance, that Sartre misunderstood Heidegger, you can only ask how Sartre’s creative misreading of Heidegger was productive. In this case you can, because there’s no theory at all, just factoids posing as theory. Some might argue that in postmodernism all facts are really theory, but here it’s the reverse: all theories end up as fact just as, to paraphrase Lukács, all content ends up form, a reified, fetishized object for exchange. GK reminds me of the character in a Forster novel who "took to ideas the way a squirrel takes to nuts: the more portable the better." To paraphrase an old Orchard Street Joke, "These aren’t theories you wear, these are theories you buy, you sell, you buy, you sell."
Because the sad part is, this book is not about art; it’s not even about theories about art; nor is it about the theories that artists, right or wrong, entertain about art. It’s not even about the theories illustrated in works of art by artists who imagine they’re being artists when they’re merely following recipes laid down by some college professor or critic. This book is about GK peering up its own collective behind. And it smells.
Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yves-Alain Bois and Benjamin Buchloh. Art Since 1900: Modernism. Antimodernism. Postmodernism. Thames and Hudson, 2004.
Paul Werner is the editor of WOID, a journal of visual language. He is author of the forthcoming Museum Inc. — Inside the Global Art World.
